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Four Writers Reunite in a New ‘City’

In the five years since the last original episode of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” the four women who wrote many of its scripts have only grown closer, serving as bridesmaids when one of their number was married and gathering for a weekly dinner they nicknamed Sushi and Story to talk about writing projects and catch up on gossip.

But they had not collaborated on a project until Liz Tuccillo, a “Sex” story editor who is best known as co-author of “He’s Just Not That Into You,” asked Cindy Chupack, Elisa Zuritsky and Julie Rottenberg for their help last summer on a new theater project: a comic soap opera that would unfold in weekly episodes, with scripts written swiftly, actors rehearsing at a breakneck pace and — instead of sets, costumes and elaborate staging — about 80 minutes’ worth of juicy dialogue and let’s-put-on-a-show energy.

The result is “Cedar City Falls,” the sassy, salty story of a Midwestern town where neighbors fall in and out of friendship (and bed) with one another and squabble over extramarital affairs, church choir rivalries, missing goats, DNA paternity tests — you know the drill. What makes the play more than a predictable soap, though, is its high spirit.

Broadway veterans like Joyce Van Patten and television actresses like Talia Balsam (Mona Sterling on “Mad Men”) — who are mother and daughter in the play and real life — are performing without salary, as are the other actors and writers. The 20-odd characters all but carom about the tiny stage as a narrator offers dryly acerbic asides. There is barely time in the week for more than two run-through rehearsals, so the performances feel fresh. And the scripts reflect the particularly well-honed sensibility of four writers who helped keep Carrie and Company up to delicious trouble for six seasons.

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Friends and writers of “Cedar City Falls”: from left, Elisa Zuritsky, Liz Tuccillo, Cindy Chupack and Julie Rottenberg.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“We’re all just very close friends in addition to trusting each other’s instincts in our personal lives and definitely in our professional lives,” said Ms. Chupack, who won an Emmy Award and three Golden Globes as writer and executive producer on “Sex and the City.” She wrote the next episode of “Cedar City Falls,” which is being performed on Tuesday nights this month at the Cell Theater in Chelsea and the next four Tuesdays at the Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. (Three other writers contributed coming episodes.)

“And I’ve never written theater before,” Ms. Chupack said, “so the idea of getting to write theater in this safe of an environment with people we love and for people we love was — how do you pass this up?”

Episodic theater became especially popular in Manhattan in the 1990s, with stage versions of television shows like “The Golden Girls” and “The Brady Bunch.” “Cedar City Falls” is perhaps most similar to “Hot Keys,” a ’90s soap opera produced onstage by Naked Angels. “Hot Keys” developed a cult following among audience members who kept coming back to check out the latest shenanigans of their favorite characters, just like die-hard fans of daytime television.

Ms. Tuccillo — who a few years before “Hot Keys” was in a similar theater soap, “Bad Neighbors: The Lower East Side Soap Opera” — said she had been missing the “tightknit writing and acting family” of “Sex and the City” since she had been working largely in isolation on a pilot for ABC and a screenplay for Will Smith’s production company. She also remembered the fun that the actors and audiences of “Hot Keys” and “Bad Neighbors” had with by-the-seat-of-your-pants theater.

“I missed that sort of inspiring, passionate, raw feeling of being so immediately connected to my own material and actors and just putting something up and really everybody coming together to do something because they love to do it,” Ms. Tuccillo said during a recent rehearsal.

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A rehearsal of “Cedar City Falls,” a live comic soap opera performing weekly this month at the Cell Theater in Chelsea.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“There’s absolutely no other reason to do this,” she said. “It’s completely inconvenient and tiring and frightening, and you’re only doing it because there’s some type of thrill and love of it.”

The 60-page scripts are “a little bit like fast-food writing” given the tight weekly deadlines, said Ms. Zuritsky, Episode No. 2 writer. The scripts are turned in on Sunday nights, memorized and rehearsed the next week and performed the Tuesday afterward. But over the years the women have developed a shared instinct for consistency and continuity that helps maintain the personalities of the “Cedar City Falls” characters no matter who wrote a particular episode.

“This has been kind of a funny process of us e-mailing and calling each other and saying, ‘What’d you do with that character?’ And, ‘Oh, you killed her?’ And, ‘She’s what? She’s marrying who? What do you mean, does she love him?’ ” Ms. Chupack said. “But as much as we each have our own voices for writing, we also came to have a feel for how each character spoke, like Lynette, the town drunk, or the young heartthrob, Gareth.”

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Last Tuesday’s episode featured the secret May-December affair between Lynette and Gareth, as well as Lynette’s attempts to bury her brother, Darryl, who was murdered in his hospital bed in the previous installment. The narrator, typically played by a well-known actor (the first week it was Jesse L. Martin), catches up new audience members with earlier plot revelations. Ms. Tuccillo described the play as a parable about how conflicts can escalate and friends can become enemies; a high point last week was the splintering of a town church, with two factions holding rival funerals for Darryl, complete with a bitterly funny showdown over his ornate casket.

Ms. Balsam, who plays Lynette, and Ms. Van Patten — who also acted together on Broadway in Neil Simon’s “Jake’s Women” — described their work on “Cedar City Falls” as exhilarating but exhausting, with pages of dialogue to learn in a few days and rehearsals moving at a rapid-fire pace under the direction of John Ruocco.

“We call each other the morning after an episode and say, ‘Aren’t you tired?’ ” Ms. Balsam said after Tuesday’s performance, sitting with her mother among the 60 seats in the audience. “But we’re handling it happily. This show is such a different kind of fun.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 26, 2009, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: And in the Next Episode of ‘Four Writers and the City’ . . . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe